his brethren than to his own, for carrying his play through. Upon the whole, we do not think the passion of jealousy, on which the plot turns, so proper for tragedy as comedy, and we would recommend to the author, if his piece survives its nine nights, to cut it down to a farce, and serve it up to the public cum mica salis in that shape. After this specimen of Mr. William Shakspeare's tragic powers, we cannot encourage him to pursue his attempts upon Melpomene; for there is a good old proverb, which we would advise him to bear in mind-ne sutor ultra crepidam. If he applies to his friend Ben, he will turn it into English for him.'

NUMBER LI.

Ulcero animi sauanda magis quàm corporis.-Ex SENTENT. Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas'd?-MACBETH.

It seems as if most of the ancient writers of history thought no events worth recording to posterity but accounts of battles and sieges and the overthrow of empires; as if men were to be celebrated only in proportion to the devastation they had made of the human species. As my respect on the contrary, is directed chiefly to those peaceable characters, who have been the benefactors of mankind, it is with pleasure, I discovered an anecdote of an ancient king of Egypt of this description, named Osymanduas this good prince, amongst other praiseworthy actions, has the credit of making the first public library in that learned nation, before books were collected at Athens by Pisistratus: Osymanduas

made no scruple to convert one of the chief temples to this generous use, and gave it in charge to the priests belonging to it to digest and arrange his collection; when this was done, he laid it open to the public, and by a very opposite and ingenious divice, which he caused to be inscribed upon the front of the edifice, invited all his subjects to enter in and partake of his benefaction: he considered it as the duty of a good king to provide against the mental as well as bodily ailments of his people; it appeared to him that books were the best medicines for the mind of man, and consequently that a collection of books, such as his library contained, might well be entitled a magazine or warehouse of medicines for the mind; with this idea he directed the following words to be engraven over the door of his library in conspicuous characters-Yuxis iarpeiov. This is a beautiful simplicity in the thought, which seems to give an insight into the benevolent design of the donor; and as I hold it a more noble office to preserve the mind in health, than to keep the body after death from corruption, I cannot hesitate to give Osymanduas more credit for this benefaction of a library, than if he had been founder of the pyramids.

As the distempers of the mind may be figuratively classed under the several characters of those maladies which are incidental to the body, so the several descriptions of books may very well be sorted into the various genera of medicines, which practice has applied to those respective distempers. A library thus pharmaceutically disposed, would have the appearance of a dispensatory, and might be properly enough so called; and when I recollect how many of our eminent collectors of books have been of the medical faculty, I cannot but think it probable that those great benefactors to literature, Ratcliffe, Meade, Sloane, Hunter, and others, have had this very idea

337 of Osymanduas in their minds, when they founded their libraries. If, therefore, it should be thought agreeable to the will of the donors, and a proper mark of respect to their memories, so to arrange their collections, now in the repositories of Oxford and the British Museum, it will be necessary to find out a different set of titles, and instead of sorting them as they now are into the compartments of The Historians; The Poets; The Divines; it will be right to set up new inscriptions in their places, and entitle them, The Alteratives; The Stimulatives; The Narcotics. I need not point out to the learned keeper of these libraries how to proceed in an arrangement, to which their own judgments are so fully competent: nothing more will be required of them, but to ascertain the particular species of disease, which the mind of the patient is affected with, and send him forthwith to the proper class of authors for his cure.

For instance: if the complaint arises from cold humours, and a want of free perspiration by a stoppage and constipation of the pores of the mind, by which the feelings are rendered inert, and deprived of that proper emanation and expansion, which the health of the soul requires; let such a one be shut into the warm bath of the Sudorifics, which I need not explain to be the Satirist, and they will soon open his pores and disperse all obstructions. If the mental disease be of the inflammatory and feverish sort, attended with fits and paroxysms of anger, envy, revenge, and other atrabilious symptoms, which cannot be mistaken, it will be proper to turn the patient into the cell of the moralists, who will naturally be found under the title of The Coolers and Sedatives: on the contrary, where the complaint is of the lethargic nature, in which irritation is necessary, the controversialists will furnish

him a remedy in short, we need only say, that when the several authors are properly arranged, every case may find its cure. The comic writers will act as carminatives to dispel the vapours; books of travels as cathartics to procure a motion; memoirs and novels will operate as provocatives; politics as corrosives, and panegyrics as emetics. Two compartments should be kept apart and specially distinguished, viz., the sacred writings under the title Restoratives, and the works of the infidels under the denominations of deadly poisons: the former will be sovereign in all galloping consumptions of dissipation, and the latter will be resorted to by none but suicides and desperadoes.

I should now dismiss the subject, but that I had forgotten to speak of the essayists, who from their miscellaneous properties certainly come under the class of compounds, and cannot therefore be so precisely specified as they are applicable to chronic diseases rather than acute ones, they may very well stand in the list of correctors, which, taken in a regular course, and under proper regimen, are found very efficacious in all cases where the constitution is impaired by excess and bad habits of living: they seem most to resemble those medicinal springs, which are impregnated with a variety of properties, and when critically analyzed are found to contain salt, nitre, steel, sulphur, chalk, and other calcareous particles: when the more respectable names of Bath, Spa, Pyrmont, Seltzer, and others, are disposed of, I am not without hope these humbler essays, which my candid readers are now in the course of taking, may be found to have the wholesome properties of Tunbridge Waters.

It is supposed that this library of the venerable Osymanduas descended to the Ptolemies, augmented

probably by the intermediate monarchs, and ultimately brought to perfection by the learned and munificent Philadelphus, son of Ptolemy Lagus, so well known for his Greek translation of the Hebrew Septuagint.

Little attention was paid to literature by the Romans in the early and more martial ages: I read of no collections antecedent to those made by Æmilius Paulus and Lucullus, the latter of whom, being a man of great magnificence, allowed the learned men of his time to have free access to his library, but neither in his lifetime, nor at his death, made it public property. Cornelius Sylla, before his dictatorship, plundered Athens of a great collection of books, which had been accumulating from the time of the tyranny, and these he brought to Rome, but did not build or endow any library for public use. This was at last undertaken by Julius Cæsar upon an impartial scale not long before his death, and the learned M. Varro was employed to collect and arrange the books for the foundation of an ample library: its completion, which was interrupted by the death of Julius and the civil wars subsequent thereto, was left for Augustus, who assigned a fund out of the Dalmatian booty for this purpose, which he put into the hands of the celebrated Asinius Pollio, who therewith founded a temple to liberty on Mount Aventine, and with the help of Sylla's and Varro's collections in addition to his own purchases, opened the first public library in Rome in an apartment annexed to the temple above mentioned. Two others were afterward instituted by the same emperor, which he called the Octavian and Palatine Libraries; the first, so named in honour of his sister, was placed in the temple of Juno; the latter, as its title specifies, was in the imperial palace: these libraries were royally endowed with esta